[The Literary Work of Art - Northwestern University Press](^3^) This is the publisher's website for

In order to understand the status of literary language, this threefold distinction is significantly more helpful than the dichotomy of performative and constative utterances. In fact, a fictional text is generally not made exclusively of utterances one would typically recognize as belonging to the family of performatives. Rather, fictional works contain descriptions, explanations, reconstructions, etc. Certainly, as Austin remarks in the above quoted passage, fictional works can also include promises, commands, and bets made by some fictional character to some other fictional characters in the fictional context. But these are as unserious as everything else is said or written in the fiction; therefore, one may ask whether is there in fact anything particular to be said about them.

VERIFIED Roman Ingarden The Literary Work Of Art Pdf

Download

In short, fictional works are dependent entities insofar as they depend: (i) on the just mentioned strata (including both material and meaningful components); (ii) on authors who produce such material and meaningful components, and (iii) on competent readership (Thomasson, 1999, p. 36). The claim concerning competent readership derives from the rather straightforward observation that no fictional entity would be produced if there were no readers capable of understanding what is written and signified in a fictional work. The dependence is here generic, because it is not the case that fictional works depend on singular, non-interchangeable readers; and it is constant, not because fictional works need to be constantly read, but because they need to be constantly readable. Accordingly, fictional entities, like characters in a novel, depend immediately on literary works and authors; while the literary work itself immediately depends on authors, copies or memories, and a competent readership (Thomasson, 1999, p. 36). This is a complete description, which exhausts the dependence relationships that define a fictional entity. Also, given that dependence is a transitive relation, fictional entities are also mediately dependent on what fictional work are dependent on: authorship, material copies, and readership.

In this article, I only focus on literary fiction, and I do not take into account other works of art. Although the ontology and phenomenology of literary fiction can be considered in several ways as paradigmatic for clarifying the mode of being and constitution of other cultural artifacts, each field of artistic and cultural production of artifacts would deserve a tailor-made investigation.

Thomasson (1999, pp. 55 f.) mentions the following two necessary, but not sufficient conditions: 1. x and y appear in the same fictional work; 2. x and y are ascribed exactly the same properties in the fictional work; as well as one sufficient, but not necessary condition across literary works: the author of a work L must be competently acquainted with x of another work K and intend to import x into L as y.

2ff7e9595c